Machine-to-machine communication is a very distinct capability that enables the implementation of the “Internet of things”. Machine-to-machine communication is defined as an information exchange between a subscriber station and a server station in a core network (through a base station) or between subscriber stations, which may be carried out without any human interaction. Its basic architecture is proposed in IEEE 802.16m. (IEEE is short for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.)
Several industry reports have scoped out the huge potential for this market, with millions of devices being connected over the next five years and revenues in excess of $300 billion (Harbor Research, 2009). So, machine-to-machine technology is a hot research item in some dominated wireless standard research groups, i.e., 3GPP and 802.16.
According to one IEEE 802.16p system requirement, a machine-to-machine system shall support a large number of devices and mechanisms for low power consumption in machine-to-machine devices. Therefore, there are expected to be a large, number of machine-to-machine devices in the domain of the machine-to-machine base station. The machine-to-machine support thus is expected to require a huge amount of interactions between the machine-to-machine devices and their supporting base station. For instance, where the base station needs to communicate with the separated machine-to-machine devices, one, by one, this would result in some network congestion.
In machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, there will be a large number of devices trying to access the channel. Thus, there is a need for a more efficient channel access mechanism to cope with this issue.